


Unmoored

by MercuryGray



Category: Mercy Street (TV)
Genre: Emotional Hurt/Comfort, F/M, Hurt/Comfort, Implied/Referenced Drug Use
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-02-02
Updated: 2016-02-02
Packaged: 2018-05-17 18:54:19
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,187
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5881822
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MercuryGray/pseuds/MercuryGray
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>(S1Ep3) In the few short weeks she has been at Mansion House Hospital, Mary Phinney has been subjected to all manner of abuse.   She has been kicked, slapped, shouted at, punched, thrown across rooms and sent careening into beds, and, on one particularly memorable occasion, bitten. Those wounds are easy -- bruises fade and skin will heal. But the morphine-addled attentions of Doctor Foster are something else entirely.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Unmoored

 

In the few short weeks she had been at Mansion House Hospital, Mary Phinney had been subjected to all manner of abuse.

 

She had been kicked, slapped, shouted at, punched, thrown across rooms and sent careening into beds, and, on one particularly memorable occasion, bitten. Those wounds were easy -- bruises faded and broken skin would heal. She had been spit at and vomited over, and had scrubbed more blood then she cared to recount. She been whistled at, leered over, frankly appraised, and she did not doubt worse still where she could not see. Men would do what lonely men would do -- and her room had a strong bolt on it. But no one -- no one! -- in her time here had laid a hand on her as Doctor Foster had done.

 

To pull her down and...and palm and kiss her! And then boldly ask, if she had not been clear enough before, to ask for _another!_

 

_“This is not you...This is not you.”_

 

Was it the manner of his conduct that frightened her, the idea that at the heart of it all she was still a woman, and subject to the same mistreatment as any other?

 

Or was it that she trusted him, liked him, even, and found it troublesome that he harbored such thoughts about her, thoughts that only the haze of the drug would call up from the veiled depths of his mind?

 

Or -- perhaps the worst of these -- that she would have welcomed such advances, were he in a better position to give them?

 

Her husband had been sick for a long time before Death had pulled him out of this world. But before the disease that had taken his life had settled into his stomach and began to choke the life out of him, Gustav von Olnhausen had been the best of husbands -- the most patient, the most kind, the most attentive. How young they had once been, how in love! How many times in the crippling grip of his illness had he lifted up a thinning hand and stroked her cheek, and made her wish he might still touch her as he had done of old? (Such clever hands he had -- gifted with everything. A chemist's sure measurements, a mechanic's ready tinkering -- a lover's soft caress. But it would be bad for him, to be so overtaxed. No, she would not ask that of him. However much he might want to give it, and she might want to ask. She was strong. She could subsist without.)

 

Yes, it had been a long time since Mary had felt a man's hands -- and so sure around her shoulders! Part of her had recoiled, repulsed by Foster's obvious collapse of reason, and another part had wished to yield, and let him do what he liked, even when she knew his mind was not his own.

 

_“Come, give us another kiss.”_

 

Oh, how she wished to, to fly into those arms like a lover, to be for a moment, not a woman of steel, but silk again. He was a handsome man, that could not be denied, and there was something of Gustav in the way he held his arms out to her, begging her to drop her reserve and modesty and come to dinner, come to his side, come to bed.

 

It had been pure instinct, to push him away, pure instinct and nothing more, the practice of three weeks spent fighting back against men in the throes of fever and the blindness brought on by unseen demons.

 

But then to see him, lying on the floor like a wounded animal! She wished to pick him up, again, and hold him while he wept in shame -- Was that not instinct, too? She wished to kiss him as she would kiss Gustav when his experiments got the better of him, and she would find him on his workroom floor weeping. (She had not known, then, of the pains in his stomach, of the slowly uncoiling snake of sickness in his bowel.)

 

But he was not Gustav. She had recoiled, and would not have gone to him but that he would have hurt himself. Had she not sworn to do no harm? She pinned his arms down to the floor with both of her own, and prayed she had not hurt him in the attempt. Her breath, coming in ragged spurts, stirred a hair upon his brow, and she fought not to smooth it down again. _I have not breathed like this since --_ no, better not to think on that.

 

Instinct had started it, but Propriety finished what Instinct had started. He was married, and she was widowed, and he was drunk (well, she would tell herself that, for she had no other word for what the morphine had done to him) and they were supposed to work together in the manner of professionals, and he was not himself, he would not say these things if he were in his proper mind, and she was better than this, better than wishing after what she could not have and should not have wanted.

 

It would have been unkind, to take advantage of him so.

 

He had no need of Mary in that moment, or _beloved_ , or _sweeting_ , or any of the thousand other tender faces she had worn for Gustav. He had need of Nurse Phinney, and Nurse Phinney was who she would have to be. She knelt and told him it would be possible to change, and tried to believe it with her tongue while her heart echoed blankly back.

 

_If you’ve become unmoored, you must anchor yourself._

 

That night, after she had allowed herself the luxury of bolting her door, crawling out of her work clothes, washing the day’s work from her face and hands, sinking in between her sheets wearing nothing but her nightgown, and drawing the covers up tightly around her chin, she let her mind drift back to that afternoon, selfishly allowing herself the consolation of the feeling, fleeting but sure, of his hands drawing themselves up along her sides to clasp her face. She turned her body against the mattress, her face pressed tight into the pillow, and let his hands slide down her back, cupping her legs as her husband used to do, her hips digging into the mattress in steady rhythm until her pulse was pounding at her ears. She let the tide roll out, pulse still pounding and found herself, finally, drifting off to sleep, his lips still warm on hers, his beard a not-unwelcome distraction.

 

In her every waking moment she was generosity and selflessness. She had no needs but those of her charges, no desires but that she should be able to attend them as they needed. She was but a pair of hands, a set of strong shoulders. But when she fell into bed each night, it was for herself alone she slept -- and while she slept she dreamed, and dreaming, too, was selfish.

  
While she was sleeping there was no need for moorings. There would be time enough for anchors in the morning.

**Author's Note:**

> I’m not saying I watched Josh Radnor and Mary Elizabeth Winstead’s arresting performance about ten times this afternoon trying to write this, but this whole scene was just so...layered! I am in constant awe of Jed’s bounces between laughter, crying, mirth and melancholy. (Also, “Oh, is that what I”m doing?” Just the way that he says it kills me.) And I love that Mary, too, is conflicted here -- for all the reasons mentioned above, I hope. They both need someone, okay? I'm not saying it has to happen next episode, but could we...entertain the possibility? Please? Maybe?


End file.
